Disciplining Inter-Employee Social Conduct

Professional Actuarial Topics General topics
23

Yes. I have seen this happen over here.

There seems to always be one/two people who have dysfunctional personalities who go running towards management anytime they take something in the wrong way in a completely social setting.

What ends up happening is everybody else ends up avoiding them because they can’t relax in a social setting around them.

I think its important to be able to socialise and relax a bit with coworkers from time to time.

They don’t have to be your best friends, but it is really destructive to team morale to have everybody doing a CYA routine anytime you have a team lunch or social.

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25

What actually happened?

26

:popcorn: :popcorn: :popcorn:

27

Here’s an example. Two managers were abruptly demoted and denied bonuses or salary increases for the year, despite the company’s strong performance. There was never officially a reason given, inviting speculation of wrongdoing or gross incompetence.

From inference and rumor, demotions stemmed from a departmental Slack chat they had established. When a new employee joined, the group would “vote” on their inclusion, though the outcome was always unanimous unless someone playfully added an alternate response.

Executives, however, apparently sprung on this chat room as an egregious violation of workplace decorum as it was unwelcoming and exclusive. As a result, the managers were required to issue a public apology, the chat was shut down, and they were demoted. Not long after, both left the company alongside others who jumped ship.

It seems likely there were ulterior motives for the firing and the social conduct was just the excuse. That would be chilling, but it’s perhaps just as bad if they were actually fired for making a collaborative and fun environment.

The situation had a dramatic effect on team morale and communication. No longer is it safe to make a “joke” at the expense of somebody who is 100% enthusiastically in on the joke. Anything you say could be retrieved to punish you.

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28

Based on the rest of your response, I’m guessing the new employees were always added to the new chat, is that right? Otherwise this does seem a little click-ish to me.

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29

That’s correct. There was never any thought that a person would be excluded. It was the team chat. The only reason for a “vote” was that they weren’t automatically added by HR, then the new person would be added. It was active inclusion - “everybody wants you here.”

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30

I see. Then yeah, if everyone was always added then that seems like just friendly banter. It does seem like there could definitely have been some different motivation from HR.

31

Sounds like there were at least a couple scenarios where someone joked that they didn’t want to include someone, and possibly stated a reason why (still joking).

Then they added the person, who could probably read those comments

And the next time the person was inadvertently excluded from something (could have been as innocent as an email chain they were forgotten to be cc’d on), they would possibly be thinking about this

And if they weren’t doing well on their performance review, they could mention, hey, I feel like my performance is suffering because sometimes I was left off of something, and there were some jokes about excluding me, which I understand are jokes, but maybe there’s a grain of truth to those jokes.

And then hey presto you’ve got a classic workplace discrimination case. Prior to Trump, if the person happened to be a minority, the case would be even stronger… now it’s theoretically not.. but that’s beside the point.

So it’s not as bad as some other workplace stuff, but it certainly is dumber because it’s so easy to turn this against the company. this is written evidence of discussion of excluding someone with probably a jokey reason why. And, it probably wasn’t applied to all employees equally - I’m guessing not every employee inclusion had this kind of bantering applied, which would be the one saving grace is if they always made this playful response. But they probably didn’t.

I’m not saying anyone complained but HR has to think about these things. I don’t know if they handled it well - it’s very possible not - and understand it might be frustrating that they reacted in this way - but the above is probably what they were thinking.

It’s possible these 2 managers made other “jokes” that were even stupider. You never know and no one’s gonna tell you. I also doubt that these managers were that good of performers if they were demoted from one action.

In general, if you are a manager, and banter with your employees, you gotta be pretty good and not stupid about it. They are not going to tell you if they are offended in the vast majority of the cases. Bantering between equals is different. So I don’t think you need to take this as a chilling impact of verbal speech between colleagues with no higher-level/lower-level dynamic. But written words from a manager to anyone new - yeah - maybe tone it down a little.

I (double minority manager) once had someone tell me by second hand that someone (a white guy part of no minorities as far as I’m aware and an analyst) was insulted by my making a game out of by ranking people on how well they made some actuarial estimates, because I was ranking people. No consequences and no request for an apology, but I apologized anyway.

33

There’s a whole lot of assumptions in there that … let’s just say chaining a lot of “what if” statements together and saying they’re all true leads to an incredibly tenuous conclusion.

34

I’m not saying they are all true, I am saying this is probably what went on in the heads of HR for taking this seriously.

35

That would seem like a really terrible way for HR to do an investigation and levy discipline.

That would really seem like a terrible way to do it if, going back to the example, neither manager had any kind of disciplinary record - not even a pull-aside, hey I know you thought you were correct when you _____, maybe next time try doing _____ discussion - before that event.

But maybe in someone’s opinion, it really was that egregious. In that case, I’d expect other people in the chat would also be subject to discipline. If that indeed happened, … OK, at least there’s a little consistency and we’re debating whether it really was that egregious and whether there’s other information that needs to be disclosed. But if no one else in the chat was disciplined, even informally, then I’m at why was this so bad that two people had to be demoted and bonuses stripped, but no one else got in trouble, not even so much as a nasty finger wag?

36

In this case, both managers were considered to my knowledge by all to be kind and courteous people. It would have been extremely out-of-character were they making some kind of disrespectful jokes behind the scenes, and regardless that wasn’t the claimed reason for the demotion.

You can take it how you wish, but the entire department saw a severe punishment that unfairly singled out just a couple of people—who, while responsible for creating the chat room, were merely part of a much larger group. The so-called “infraction” seemed minor at best, and in my opinion could have been resolved with nothing more than a private note about how it could be misinterpreted.

37

Have you been paying attention to the news lately? There are reasons other than poor performance why someone would be demoted/ forced out.

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38

True if they were working for the federal government, but nowhere in the post does it mention that is a possibility.

39

agreed, this is the norm to expect, if there was no previous record and this was one isolated action

40

even if there was some other reason in addition to the chat room, it is highly unlikely anyone would share it with people. HR wouldn’t because unless there is a business reason to share it, they could get in trouble (I guess you could argue the way it is impacting morale, there is a business reason, but they’re not going to proactively share it unless someone says it is impacting morale, and even then they most likely won’t.) The managers won’t because it’s personal.

41

If this is the case, maybe you’ve got someone high ranking who’s just looking to get rid of people. That’s probably not going to make you feel better, but that can happen. It usually happens when the business unit is losing money, someone new comes in, something like that.

42

Probably worth saying again.

I try to work with known information and evaluate it to draw a careful but informed conclusion that’s reasonably supportable but contains necessary qualifiers that allow for re-evaluation when new information becomes available, rather than speculate without a proper basis and hypothesize scenarios and assume all of that is accurate and then run off to some conclusion and treat it as fact.

OPMMV, though.

43

spoken like a true actuary

I’ve already had people tell me I don’t do what a true actuary does, though

44

Agreed with @Ted_Hoffman that there are a lot of inferences being made. Of course it’s possible that both managers, widely liked and viewed as more than competent, were secretly horrible people making inappropriate comments behind employees’ backs. It seems unlikely.

The reason given for demotion was that the managers were not being inclusive.
Specifically, they were required to apologize for creating the departmental chat room (despite every departmental employee being included) before all departmental communication was shut down.